08/11/2025
The long standing academic anarchist journal Freedom carries a fascinating editorial this month in which it examines how the fake culture war over supposed "free speech" on campus has actually been used to close down the left, feminist, transgender activists, and disabled people among others. Punkacademic examines how this situation has come about and how right wing news outlets like the Spectator, Telegraph and Daily Mail have constructed a false narrative about freedom on campuses.
Here is the editorial, thanks to Freedom News for this: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/11/04/free-speech-on-campus-only-for-rac...
The news that ten student protestors at the University of Leicester have been convicted of ‘aggravated trespass’ with the connivance of the University authorities should, even today, give pause for thought as to what British universities have become. The first to be convicted for a campus occupation in over a decade, they were arrested in November 2024 for protesting the University’s complicity in the arms trade which enabled Israel to lay waste to Gaza.
As these students are ‘cancelled’, the supposed arch-defenders of free speech on campus are unsurprisingly silent. The manufactured ‘free speech crisis’ of the past decade has served its purpose on the right, bringing universities to heel if they do not bow to pressure to host racist speakers or allow transphobic bile on campus. It was never really about free speech; it certainly wasn’t about students.
But the present escalation represents a further disenchantment of any idea of universities as the ‘utopian place’ Edward Said once claimed they might be. As anarchists we are rightly sceptical of universities’ privilege and exclusion, but the idea of an egalitarian learning community has its merits.
More bluntly it is something, rightly or wrongly, that most UK university students—and staff—have on some level believed in. Though the triumph of the knowledge economy and the imposition of fees regimes has largely reduced university education to bang for buck students still—still—arrive at university keen to discover themselves, each other, and the possibilities new ideas can give them.
‘Academic freedom’ (as it was termed before that phrase was captured by fascists as a licence to spread hate without censure) incorporated both students and staff. A republican idea of citizenship in a learning community, it drew on German ideas about research and teaching and medieval debates on ‘the arts of liberty’. It was repackaged in the post-war period as a bulwark against totalitarianism, the institutionalised ability to criticise without fear.
Some of this was always liberal bullshit, but in post-war Britain it influenced how academics and students thought of themselves. They were at the heart of protest in the 1960s, in the UK as elsewhere. The 1968 revolt in France—in part spurred by actions by anarchist students at Nanterre—had its echo in Britain.
For a time students were taken seriously enough that a Penguin Special was dedicated to their insurrection, including essays from several prominent student members of the New Left. The Freedom Press journal Anarchy—edited by Colin Ward—approvingly remarked that “Anarchist flags flew over not only the Odeon in Paris, but over the University of Kent at Canterbury”.
But the ties between British universities and the warfare state were strong. Apart from universities’ role in the science base, some enlisted corporate spies to watch their students carefully during the student revolt of the 1960s, a trend which is the norm today. During an occupation at Warwick in 1970 files were found evidencing surveillance of students and academic staff. Working with the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, the students exposed this scandal which shocked the nation, first in the pages of New Society magazine (which Ward also wrote for) and then in the form of the book Warwick University Ltd.
Today students find themselves saddled with debt in an economy devastated with financialisation, whilst universities have been demonised as ‘treasonous’ institutions in a febrile political environment where far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories of ‘cultural Marxism’ have been normalised into mainstream political positions on the right. This includes baseless claims that ‘woke academics’ are ‘cancelling’ the views of those they disagree with, and that ‘student mobs’ are undermining ‘academic freedom’ itself by having the temerity to disagree with things like genocide or transphobia.
These right-wingers argued—as did their well-funded think tanks and billionaire backers—that the key was to restore ‘free speech’. With their tribunes in the right-wing press close at hand, conspiracy theory based on lies became government policy; the Office for Students was created and ultimately handed powers to enforce a ‘free speech duty’ including fining universities and ‘de-registering’ them if they did not comply. The University of Exeter in 2018 appointed the Regional PREVENT coordinator to its governing body, embedding a key figure in the state apparatus at the heart of its governance.
Repression of student political protest in the UK has proceeded apace, with universities pursuing students with disciplinary procedures for their support of pro-Palestine activism and collaborating with arms companies to surveil their students at their behest. In one case, a university even offered to monitor students’ social media and responded to requests to involve their Safeguarding team against student activists.
Students then, who do not generally have columns in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, or the Spectator, are being cancelled en masse with the collusion of their institutions. Supposedly taught to be ‘citizens for change’ at Leicester, when they attempted to effect change they faced disciplinary procedure or prosecution.
As anarchists, we can never be complacent about the practical realities of institutions founded by the state, funded by the state, and in the service of the state. But the prosecution of the Leicester students is both an act of gross repression in itself, and a fundamental illustration of the absolute lie that was the right’s confected ‘free speech crisis’ of the past decade.
Now there is a free speech crisis in universities today—a free speech crisis over the right to protest genocide—and the students are the ones cancelled. As if any further proof were needed, the fate of the courageous Leicester students – and the silence of right-wing provocateurs who supposedly believed in ‘free speech on campus’—is a perfect example of why good faith should never be extended to a politics rooted in lies and deceit, a politics which destroys the very thing it claims to defend.
